Miglin Suspect Now Among Fiends On Fbi Website

May 14, 1997|By Mary Schmich.

If a man can be known by the company he keeps, Andrew Cunanan is now officially a creep among creeps.

Cunanan, the California man who allegedly has sprinted from state to state in a killing spree that included Chicago developer Lee Miglin, joined an elite group Tuesday when the FBI posted him among the fugitives it publicizes on the World Wide Web.

These are men--and a couple of women--who live life on the lam, known to the world by their weights and birthdates, by the color of their eyes and skin, by their aliases and disguises, by their tattoos, scars and crimes.

Call up the website (http://www.fbi.gov) and, after checking out three photographs of a smiling Andrew Cunanan, you can take a tour through the fugitives' club into which he's been inducted.

The veteran on the Ten Most Wanted List, for example, is a big-tipping, flashy-dressing jack-of-all-trades named Donald Eugene Webb. He's been on the run for 17 years after allegedly murdering the police chief in Saxonburg, Pa. "A master of assumed identities," as the FBI dubs him, Webb specializes in burglarizing jewelry stores, but he's been a car salesman, a real estate salesman, a butcher, a restaurant manager and a vending machine repairman. He's crazy about dogs.

Aside from Cunanan, the most recent addition to the most-wanted list is David Alex Alvarez, a former pesticide technician and picture framer who last year allegedly murdered four people at a home in Baldwin Park, Calif. Two were girls, ages 9 and 12. He wears a tattoo on his neck that says "Patricia."

The youngest member of the most-wanted crowd is Agustin Vasquez-Mendoza, 27, a skinny, 5-foot-3-inch laborer and commercial fishing mate who allegedly killed a drug enforcement agent during an undercover drug transaction in 1994 in Arizona. He wears silver-capped teeth and gold neck chains with his pricey slacks and cowboy boots.

Then there's Glen Stewart Godwin, a black-haired, green-eyed one-time mechanic whose claim to fame is not just the murder he committed in 1981 but the escape he staged in 1987 from California's Folsom State Prison, where he climbed through a storm drain to the American River and into a waiting raft.

The most-wanted list includes, as well, a black-eyed Pakistani wanted for shooting five people with an AK-47 and a green-eyed bandit who handcuffed, bound and drugged two security guards at a security company, then ran off with $7 million.

The two most famous members of the list are the Libyans wanted for blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

But there's also the tippling cook with the pockmarked face and the chest tattoo who's wanted for murdering a Vietnamese businessman. And the guy with the scar on his neck and the track marks on his arms who's being sought for trying to murder a New Jersey state trooper with a .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun.

Those fugitives are the nation's 10 most wanted, but the FBI is after others, too, creeps whose names are kept on a sort of junior varsity list.

The 15 on the JV list include Bruce Keith Woodruff, a motorcycle-riding "neat freak" wanted for molesting two teenage girls while he was mayor of Wickenburg, Ariz.

Two women are on the JV list. One is Carol Payne, a 61-year-old ardent gambler who along with her husband is accused of cashing 44 bad payroll checks. The other is Gloria Louise Schulze, a red-haired, green-eyed market researcher who allegedly killed a 21-year-old woman in a traffic accident. The dead woman had been president of her high school chapter of Students Against Drunk Driving. Schulze allegedly had been drinking.

The JV list also includes two accountants. One is Paul Hillard Cohen, who disappeared after allegedly stealing money from members of his investment club in New York. He likes bars and health clubs.

The other is Roderick Neal Hotham, who's wanted for bank fraud and money-laundering. He enjoys baseball and collects antique radios.

The tour through the FBI fugitives' lists is, in the end, a tour through deviance and desperation and vanity, through the terrible things people do to other people, through luck that may not hold.